Farm Based Sustainable Agriculture Education Programs

This project has a two-fold objective: to contribute to a culture of sustainability in our larger community and to enhance the health and economic viability of our small farm in particular. There are several barriers to long-term sustainable agriculture in this region. The piece this project seeks to address this community's alienation from its sources of food. We propose introducing sustainable agriculture practices to children as a means to reconnect people to their food. Children today generally have few opportunities to experience and practice sustainable agriculture first-hand. Our project seeks to ameliorate this in small part, by providing a series of affordable workshops for local children. The financial health of our farm depends on community support. This is because we market our produce locally, in accordance with our conviction that producing healthy food locally is essential to sustainability. We plan to use on-farm education programs as a means to increase farm income directly, through workshop registration fees and indirectly by increasing the farm "traffic" and thereby increasing on-farm sales.